alt Hacker News> This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
I'm a bit confused. Was there a missing "not" somewhere in the first sentence? Your second sentence there begins with "instead", which makes it seem like you're saying you don't believe in "introducing intentional unfairness" but the first sentence says you think it is a valid approach.
Overall I agree that tinkering with specific details like test score thresholds is not a great idea, although I think my perspective is a bit different from what you're saying here. My view is that these various manipulations of educational parameters won't work because the differences in educational outcomes are largely a result of differences in parents' economic circumstances. Or, put another way, the "inputs" to the educational system, in terms of where kids are at when they enter it, are at least as important as what the system does once kids are in it. We cannot equalize the outputs without equalizing the inputs.
That's not to say that things like the Dallas approach you linked to are bad or will have zero effect, just that it can only get us so far.
>> > This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
I am indeed missing a "not". That should be "...is not a valid way to do it".
And I kind of agree with you. I spent quite a bit of time growing up kibbitzing conversations with people involved in the now-defunct University of California affirmative action system, and I learned a few things, or at least a few things that the people I talked to believed. There are plenty of things one can measure: SAT scores, GPA, race, parents' income (W-2, AGI, whatever is reportable on FAFSA), statistics about the high school that the applicant went to. And there are goals one can try to meet with one's evaluation and that one can try to estimate: aptitude for college, grit, race (of course), degree to which they outperformed expectations, etc.
So one can be fair in the sense of admitting people only based on their present measurements (SAT score, for example). Or one can be differently fair and throw parents' income into the mix, but this has issues: certain groups, in a manner that is highly correlated with race, have family wealth and resources that are not reflected in W-2 income. You can try to correct for that by throwing race into the mix, and that is a giant rabbit hole and now rather illegal. One can try to account for kids who have excellent aptitude but test poorly because they were at a bad school, and this is hard, and maybe one's analysis indicates that race should be a feature used for this purpose, and see above about rabbit holes. One can strive for racial equality (does that mean equal fraction black and white? or matching population demographics? population demographics where? or just less outrageously imbalanced?), but how does one go about this?
In any case, the laws and judicial opinions changed, and UC had been considering race, and they stopped. And I think this was for the best. Regardless of statistics, considering an applicant's race directly seems very unfair. And it forced the people who wanted to improve equality to find what I think are better approaches: outreach, trying to improve the pipeline, etc. And, frankly, I don't think I'd want my own race to be considered in my applications for things, regardless of whether that consideration would make me more or less likely to be accepted.